Alice’s Fostering Blog

Wednesday.

What a week – the heat has been stifling and we have hardly been able to leave the house. We are off camping next week, so we have been trying to sort out all our equipment. Last year our tent broke in torrential rain – letting in water the Lauren and Annie’s pods. It looked beyond repair so we didn’t bring it home. I’m not sure how many more times I can put myself through the ordeal of camping, and so didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a new tent. Fortunately a friend of a friend has loaned us their family tent along with a whole load of camping stuff that we do not own – gazebos, tables, camping cupboards etc. When we went to collect all the stuff, they just mentioned as we were leaving that they were not sure if the last people who had borrowed it had dried it out properly.

Oh dear – that means we need to put the tent up before we go – just in case! I guess it will give us a practice of putting it up before we go, which probably isn’t a bad thing. We have been putting off this job for the last two weeks – it is far too hot to do this, but now we are running out of time.

Lauren and Annie are more that happy to help, and after an almighty meltdown from Alice, we decided to wait until she was in bed. Last year her help consisted of holding the bag of tent pegs while shouting very unhelpful instructions to us – we literally wanted to throttle her. I am so glad we did put the tent up before we went – it wasn’t because there was any problem with it – actually it was in perfect condition, but because of the sheer size of the thing – it looked like an entire village could fit into it. It was a good job we could see the scale of the thing so we know how much space we need when we get to the camp site!

The good thing is – that if we get the same kind of rain we had last year – the tent gives us plenty of living space so we are not on top of each other. We make a plan as to who is going to have which pod – that way when we get there on Saturday we can just tell Alice where she is going to be – having a choice is not a good thing – as she will simply want whichever one Lauren goes for.

So now the countdown to camping begins and I need to get through a huge to do list before we go… I am just hoping now for an easy few days and a little drop in temperature would be nice.